“Homicide is the major leagues, the center ring, the show. It always has been. When Cain threw a cap into Abel, you don’t think the Big Guy told a couple of fresh uniforms to go down and work up the prosecution report. Hell no, he sent for a fucking detective.”
-David Simon
Tracing all the way back to the formative formulations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and, appropriately enough, Baltimore’s native son Edgar Allen Poe, detective stories have comprised one of the most enduring genres in popular fiction. But not since the classics pulps of the 20’s and 30’s became the silver screen masterpieces of the 40’s and 50’s have detective stories been so prolific or so profitable. Today, we’ve largely traded the big screen for the small; and in the place of hard boiled PIs and fatalistic dames we’ve got forensic anthropologists, crime scene investigators, mathematicians, medical examiners, and more g-men than a hunt for the Barrow gang. And what do they all have in common? A very big debt to the Homicide Unit of the Baltimore Police Department – a canon of ordinary anti-heroes, of home grown legends, of real-fucking-life in a broken dream genuine American murder police. This is the story of how such an unlikely lot came to revitalize a genre and help kick a medium into revolution.
January 31, 1993 was a monumental day in TV history, and not on account of Michael Jackson’s half-time performance at Super Bowl XXVII. That night, NBC chose to follow up the singular annual televised sporting event with a brazen new series, a grim and savagely stylistic cop drama against which even the best of it’s predecessors seemed timid and utterly romantic. If the pilot of Homicide: Life on the Streets were to air tonight, it would still shock audiences. At the heart of literally every story the series sets out to tell, there is death. And not just any death, but the death of one person at the hands of another – acts of malice, of madness, of passion – a seemingly endless thread of human misery.
If the shows macabre themes and calloused heroes weren’t abrasive enough, veteran film director Barry Levinson opens up with an array of fast and loose techniques that serve to constantly jar the senses. It’s a revolutionary piece of television for any era, but in 1993 it’s a wonder the pilot was picked up at all.
In fact, unchecked boldness being met with wholly unexpected success is a big part of the homicide story, which really begins four years earlier when a Baltimore Sun reporter too young to be called a veteran and too seasoned to be called a cub had the balls to ask his city’s police commissioner for permission to observe the homicide unit and write a book about them. What David Simon found when he was miraculously permitted to do so was the center stage for the darkest of human dramas in one of the bleakest pieces of real estate in the American landscape. And taking record, sorting out the unpleasant details and bearing witness to it all, thirty-five men and one woman who stood apart as a true elite. If that sounds theatrical, well, all I can say is they deserve it. When a homicide detective is at their best, they’re fucking Batman – all “soft eyes” and calculating minds, challenging the casual observer to question where they draw the line between human and super-human.
But they are human. Hauntingly, tragically human. And knowing that, it sends shivers down your spine to think of the side of humanity they look on, day in and day out. This is the world Simon stumbled into, drama on the scale of the funny-books, and human lives anchoring it all to reality. And he captured that world, eloquently, honestly, and with a lot of help from the detectives themselves. They lent him their cooperation, their insights into the human condition, and most importantly a gallows-humor worthy of Odin.
Although David Simon penned only one episode in the first two seasons of Homicide, and claims that the shooting script for the episode was little more than half his, his prints are all over the early episodes. Throughout his book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, Simon repeatedly calls out the popular myths about policing that had been shaped over decades and decades of poorly researched and mostly fabricated police dramas; inaccuracies which compound into conventions and the worst kinds of myth. These must have been the passages which caught the attention of Barry Levinson and company, if the Levinson helmed pilot episode is any indicator. Consciously establishing what was to be the shows template, Levinson, along with producer Tom Fontana and writer/creator Paul Attanasio, set out to dispel many of the same myths Simon railed against. They shy away from romance, not sanitizing and simplifying the reality of homicide police, but relating it, as honestly and directly as the medium and the network would allow.
A decade after the fact, the look and feel of David Simon’sThe Wire, arguably television’s most monumental drama, would be built upon a groundwork laid by Homicide, but early on Levinson’s stylistic template was a tough pill to swallow for the hired directors coming out of more conventional studio backgrounds. The series was shot on location in Baltimore, with minimum fuss and less equipment. The result, especially when combined with the jump-cuts which became an essential part of the shows style, was a powerful aesthetic which captured the essence of Baltimore and made it the central element of the show which it should have been.
Between writers, directors, and the network all trying to adjust to new ideas, there’s plenty of wavering in the shows first two seasons. NBC in particular seemed to have no idea what to do with the show. Mid-way through the first season they bumped their order from six to nine episodes – and either because increased of network involvement or because the show’s creators were spread to thin, there’s a definite inconsistency of quality at the tail end of the first season. Wether it was on account of such inconsistencies or the show’s perpetually lack-luster ratings, the following year NBC ordered only four episodes. The network’s semi-rejection, probably in combination with critical acclaim, seems to have sent Homicide into an all or nothing mode. By the season’s conclusion, an explosive episode penned by Simon himself and guest starring Robin Williams, all parties involved seem to have finally landed on the same page. The stage is set for the daring to police drama to continue forward, asking questions about fiction, drama, and television few had ever dared to ask before, burning along the road less taken in a broken down Cavalier.
Michael Re is a freelance writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and story-telling has long been the proverbial monkey on his back. For the last few years, he’s worked as a critic of comics, film, and television, all the while toiling away at his own creative pursuits in an effort to always put his money where his mouth is. His most noteworthy accomplishments are as a song-writer, having co-written and performed on nearly a dozen records. He also watches entirely too much television, and is very glad for an opportunity to justify doing so.
Michael is also an acting editor at In Genre. 
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